“Nicely done, Weps,” Seagraves said. “So, Mr. Pacino, what do you think now?”
“Sir,” Pacino began, “I’d come up beside the L-class when she’s steaming submerged, lock out the commandos, and get them to wrap a net of some type around the L-class’ screw.”
“Hopefully without getting ourselves wrapped around the screw,” Fishman said.
Pacino continued. “That’s going to be tough at five knots, though.”
Aquatong put his hands behind his head and grinned. “That’s what we do for a living, Patch. That’s why we get the big bucks.”
“So then what?” Seagraves asked Romanov.
“Well,” Romanov said. “The sub surfaces. A hatch pops open and one or more crewmen come out. The SEALs use non-lethal weapons to take out the crewmen and take over the submarine, or in the worst case, use lethal force. We augment them with a crew of two of our qualified officers so they can operate the boat and steam it to Andros Island, Bahamas, at the Navy/DynaCorp AUTEC test range, where the CIA will be waiting to study the boat.”
Pacino raised his hand self-consciously, wondering if he’d be ridiculed for acting like he was a second-grader trying to get the teacher’s attention.
Romanov smiled warmly at him. “Yes, you in the back, Mr. Pacino, you have a question?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Pacino said. “This target is diesel-electric. We’ll hear him when he’s on his diesels — assuming he can snorkel — but when he’s submerged on his batteries, he’s going to disappear into the ocean background noise.”
“Spoken like the sonar officer he is,” Spichovich said harshly, his annoyance again directed at the navigator. Pacino glanced at the weapons officer. Obviously, there was some beef between the two department heads.
“He’ll come out of port in the belly of this freighter,” Romanov said, clicking to the next slide, showing a photograph of a fairly large container ship, the slide after that showing the ship in a schematic drawing in profile view. The hold below the waterline had a submarine stowed in it, dotted lines marking underwater panels of the ship’s hull that could be removed to allow the submarine to submerge under the freighter. “This design partially replicates the CIA-commissioned Howard Hughes’ ship Glomar Explorer, which was built in the 1970s to recover a Soviet submarine off the seafloor and pull its hull into the hold of the ship, but in this case, the submarine is assembled and constructed inside the freighter, and when it is ready to launch, leaves the freighter’s hold and disappears for the Florida coast. When this happens, there will be a thousand transients as divers open up the under-hold panels to allow the sub to leave—”
“Divers?” Spichovich asked. “Divers in this crystal-clear Caribbean seawater? Do you understand that if we’re close enough, they’ll see us visually? What happens to this mission then?”
Romanov inclined her head, her jaw clamped. “We’ll stay a clear distance from the freighter when he’s preparing to launch the L-class, for that exact reason. Once the L-class clears the freighter and makes his way north, we believe he will be submerged and snorkeling to charge his batteries. Once the operation has progressed to the point that the L-class is under the control of the SEALs, we’ll lock out the two officers who will take the boat back to AUTEC. Narco-sub submerges and heads north. We submerge and clear datum. The entire incident? It never happened. We were never there. Any other questions?”
Spichovich waved his hand. “Can we see the op order?” The navigator opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, Spichovich put his palm out and said, “You know what — I don’t even want to know. But tell me this — why wouldn’t the L-class leave the freighter’s hull with a full battery charge, then just steam silently away?”
“Intelligence on the L-class says it can get shorepower when its mother ship is tied up at the pier but not once the freighter puts to sea. It’s a short sail to the hundred-fathom curve, but still, unrigging the bracing inside the hold takes time, there could be problems or issues getting the hold doors open, and that entire time, the sub is on internal power on her batteries, and she isn’t rigged to snorkel inside the hold. That would be like warming up your car in the garage with the garage door closed. I know,” she said, as Spichovich raised his hand, “that would be easy to fix with a ventilation system or an exhaust plenum to get the diesel exhaust out of the hold, or a shorepower connection inside the freighter, but things are not yet that sophisticated. There’s obviously plenty of money to make ship alterations, but maybe the profits from the previous trips are paying for production expansions. Plus, if it works — if it ain’t broke — don’t fix it.”
The engineer spoke up then. “What about the crew of the Bigfoot? What do we do with them?”
“Commander Fishman?” Romanov asked.
The SEAL commander shrugged. “Hostages create trouble. There’s the risk of them escaping their restraints and thwarting the mission and killing us or sinking the boat. And hostages consume manhours. Someone has to keep an eye on them, allow them to use the bathroom, give them food, water. You need one person on our team for every three hostages to be safe. That’s a 24-hour thing, so three men standing one eight-hour watch a day or two four-hour watches a day. We don’t have six extra people for this mission. So we either kill them or leave them.”
“Leave them?” Lewinsky asked.
“Put them in a raft with some rations and water and leave them to be rescued. Or apprehended and arrested.”
“Any other questions?”
Every officer in the room had a question, it seemed, until they reached the limits of what was known about the L-class. Seagraves stood, thanked the navigator, and he and the XO left the room. Romanov gathered up her tablet and shot a glare at Spichovich, shook her ponytail off her shoulder and stormed out of the room. Pacino looked at Spichovich, who shrugged as if there were no explanation for his issues with the navigator.
“My advice, Mr. Pacino? We’ll be on a barrier search. This could go on for days. When we eventually detect this guy, we could be at battlestations rigged for ultra-quiet for hours, even days, with no sleep and the only food a plate of peanut butter sandwiches with coffee cups of bug juice to wash it down. So, while we search and wait, I suggest you get as much sleep as you can.”
Pacino nodded and left, taking the steep stairs to the upper level and around two passageway corners to his stateroom. He hung up his coveralls and climbed into the bunk and tried to sleep, but his mind wouldn’t stop spinning about the operation and his part in it. Approach officer. Every eye in the control room would be on him, from the captain on down.
After an hour of anxiety, he finally sank into sleep and a dream about carrying a hunter’s rifle into thick woods, searching for something that never appeared.
9
Pacino had drifted into a deep sleep, coming out of it abruptly as the messenger of the watch violently pulled his bunk curtain aside, stuck his head in, shook Pacino’s shoulder and whispered intensely, “Man battlestations!”
“What time is it?” Pacino asked groggily.
“Zero five hundred, sir. Come on, out of the bunk.”
Pacino got hastily out of the bunk and found his coveralls and sneakers, yawning, the grogginess making him wish he hadn’t taken Spichovich’s advice and stayed awake. He’d kill for a steaming cup of coffee, he thought, taking the ladder down to the middle level and making his way to the crowded control room. He felt his nerves vibrating the way they had just before he’d driven the ship out. But that had just been shiphandling. This was a real operation. A combat operation, even if the opponent were unarmed. Or armed with only shotguns, rifles and pistols, not missiles or torpedoes.